Improve Your Posture Through Your Feet
You’ve probably heard the expression: "You can’t build a strong house on a crooked foundation. "
Just like a solid foundation is essential for a sturdy house, our bodies also need a well-balanced base for proper function. If you're experiencing lower back pain, muscle stiffness, or decreased range of motion, the root of the problem might go beyond the site of pain.
The problem may be coming from your feet!
You may not actually have foot pain, but the foot is composed of 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments, all of which serve the purpose of telling your brain where you are in space. The feet also share an intimate connection with the bones and muscles located above the ankle due to the anatomical chain.
Foot alignment can cause an array of problems, including back pain, sciatica, sacral joint pain, sway back, hip joint pain, posture problems, tightness in the legs and back, disc bulges, knee pain, osteoarthritis, pelvic imbalance, piriformis syndrome, and even headaches. And that does not include problems that can occur with the actual feet themselves.
How can your feet affect your posture?
According to a 2009 American Podiatric Medical Association study, the average person walks 8,000 to 10,000 steps in one day.
Proper weight-bearing surfaces not only give your body optimal postural alignment, they also prevent you from wasting energy standing upright.
This is especially important if you are seeking an active lifestyle. With misaligned feet, all of this walking can be very hard on your body and spine and ultimately alter the mechanics of your spine.
Let’s look closer: if one foot pronates and the other supinates in a static posture, those imbalances will also take effect as you walk.
Your knee rotates inward, and your hip moves down on that side. The opposite will also happen with the supinated foot.
Let’s look closer: if one foot pronates and the other supinates in a static posture, those imbalances will also take effect as you walk.
Your knee rotates inward, and your hip moves down on that side. The opposite will also happen with the supinated foot.
So what can you do?
The missing link from most conventional treatments is to look at the feet through Neuroscience. The skin of the feet sends information to the thalamus and sensory cortex. This information is then transmitted to the premotor and motor cortex for the execution of movement.
The foot is composed of muscles and joints, all of which are part of our proprioceptive system.
When you function on a daily basis with uneven muscle tension, your muscles are unable to revert back to their original state.
After 365 days, this irregular muscle tension becomes fixated, and your brain can no longer reverse the process.
Using the foot as a doorway to change faulty motor patterns is the first step in retraining your brain to eliminate muscular imbalances. You will feel much lighter and looser.
This is why we’ve created Proprioceptive Insoles. They are uniquely designed to stimulate the conscious and unconscious proprioceptive pathways that modulate muscle tone.
When worn daily, they reverse the adaptation of the fascial and muscular system, slowly aligning the spine and reverting your posture to its physiological state.
Here is a list of a few studies
